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Sunday 12 October 2008

Lost property

Melissa Kite leads a Real Life

After the split, I put them under the stairs, thinking they couldn’t hurt me if they were hidden behind the vacuum cleaner, but they can. I can feel the horrible, sloppy things gaping at me from behind the door whenever I pass it. There are clever people who will say that the boots are merely a symbol of the bad fit of the relationship, a reminder of the baggy emptiness of my life now that I am single again. I, on the other hand, know that having a £170 pair of defunct Ugg boots festering in your understairs cupboard is easily more annoying than losing the partner you had envisaged spending the rest of your life with.

While the relationship thing is tragic, there is something utterly paralysing about the boots fiasco. I have repeatedly woken in a sweat in the middle of the night rambling incoherently about it: ‘Too big! Too big!’ As a result I can’t get anything out from under the stairs, such as the cat travel boxes, for fear of catching sight of them. This means I cannot take Louis to the vets to get his teeth cleaned. The boots have brought my life to a standstill.

I would shut my eyes, reach into the cupboard, pull them out and fling them into the wheelie bin. But that would only get me fined by the council for callously putting items in the food rubbish which might clothe a sub-Saharan orphan if I took them to the appropriate state-sponsored unwanted shoe-dumping facility. I don’t suppose the bin-surveillance unit at the town hall would be interested in hearing that I failed to comply with recycling edict number 117 because I am freshly emotionally bereaved and co-dependent.

I may have to auction them on eBay: ‘One pair of Ugg boots, wrong size, purchased in a hurry to placate (ex-)boyfriend, now causing owner complete mental breakdown. Please pay full price or will only have to resent you for years as well.’

Actually, now I think about it, I’m not co-dependent. I’m a people-pleasing enabler with exploding doormat tendencies. There is a difference.

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